Mindhole

Well it seems i blowed my chanches to get to the Film school i wanted. Well its no biggie really since it would have been hell to move about 800km just to get there. Anyway it is time to reveal my backup plan which is 10 months of 3dMax coursing funded by some local company (i think). Sounds intresting (the 3d part atleast). Not too hot about the "max" part i am afraid.

Oh and incase you do not know yet. This blog is about to shut down and move to new addres. New adress will be something like http://www.aeon-visuals.com/blog .. Well thats about for now.

I know it sounds very odd. But let me tell you a story about a computer with Dual booting system.

Once upon time there was small PC which was running Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.04 (Linux) on dual booting Maxtor 80gb SATA HD. The computer was relatively new and all was fine until one day. The computer case started to resonate HD sounds. Now in case you are interested what case we are talking about its one of those Antec:s "quiet" ones. Owner of that PC tightened the fastenings of the casing a bit and some noises were eliminated. At one point the user had to boot to Windows XP to work on some "limited stuff". On booting user found out that his casing started to make resonating noises again. And once Windows XP was running the resonating continued, so he figured its just not the startup sounds of computer making the resonating. After while on XP he decided to go back to Ubuntu and just like magic the resonating got a lot quieter.

So let me ask you this. What on earth is Windows doing to make HD to give so bad vibes to the casing that it starts to make resonating noises. Is there something really bad HD reading voodoo going on the Windows partition or what the hell is going on? Now i might be bit exaggerating when i say XP harms PC.. well i mean that resonating is very irritating. So irritating in fact that it encourages owner of the PC to "tap" the casing sometimes so it would at least give a moment of peace from that horrid sound.

Topic is true to me. Let me explain a bit.

In last December i bought this new shiny PC nice powerful (Quadcore yaddayaddayaa) and i decided Hey lets go Linux! . So my friend suggested to go for Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy?). Which was very nice (despite few oddities). After some months (6 i think? Since they release new version every 6th month) Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron arrived and new version of Blender too 2.46 Peach. I was quite exited really. As both Ubuntu 7.10 and Blender 2.45 had been very useable and stable for me. So i went and upgraded both.

After getting my Blender folders in new order trouble started. I found out that there is some bug in NVIDIA drivers that cause total system freeze randomly when editing models. YAY! i said. This bug is quite harmless, but it is really killing my productivity. After some more work i found out that for some reason the sliders (or what ever they are called, which you use to adjust numeric values on Blender on some panels) seem to forget to update and act oddly if they go partially under Ubuntus lower toolbar (or what ever that thing is called).

Also i have had few other oddities with this new Ubuntu. Browser seems to forget my "last open tabs". Yeah its fault in Firefox, but still. Feels odd. Then i had some other stuff going on with the login system the other day. Ubuntu got some update and asked for reboot. So i went and told it to reboot (might have accidently pressed to just log out), it went to login screen. I was bit WTF at the moment but i logged in just to see what is going on. The second it logged in, it started boot sequence (logged me out and rebooted)

Anyway my 3D stuff is gone pretty much to total halt with all these "minor" problems. Not even sure to whom complain and would it do any good. Well i am going to leave it be for now since i am going to have some free time in my wilderness hut. Pan a bit of gold perhaps and come back in July. Oh before that wilderness trip i am going to tryout exams to Film school. Wish me luck.

Have a nice summer.

After reading some blog posts about the ongoing debate on what should Ton Roosendaal and other Blender DEV:s reply to MS offer about file format support. There was many interesting points in Slashdot.org post. After reading all of them and giving some thought of my own i think there is really one course of action if they want to go forward with co-operating with MS.

Do it only in the terms that you can do stuff on Linux as you can do in Windows. Though i think it might be the goal of MS to get Blender work on Windows better to slow down the emigration from their OS to *nix systems. Now i am not too familiar with all of the OOXML ... ISO stuff, but what i gather it sounded something like MS is trying to trick basic users into believing that its open software as it should be when its not, thus making many softwares "Windows specific".

So Ton & Other Blender DEV:s, please be careful. They cant outsmart this one.

btw: if you came here from my post on the blog. I did this earlier than that.

(Sorry if this seems like thing of past, but i accidently deleted this and had to remake it)

Now and then when i speak to beginners in 3D graphics or otherwise people who are not aware of some basic ideology of optimized lighting in Blender in means of "Render speed wise". People seem to think that everything must be raytraced to get nice results and stuff. Well i suppose its true in cases where photorealism is required. However i see many times beginners doing their scenes (very simple usually) and then slapping on every possible raytracing option hoping it will look good but generally all they get is their computer choke on the CPU load. There are many cases where raytracing is almost must (at least with my knowledge level). Like mirrors and more advanced glass like things. But even with these two there are cases where you can "cheat" your way to faster renderspeeds and eye wont know the difference (well maybe if one really starts closely to inspect the image). I was planing to talk about some useful things about rendering faster in this blog. If this does not interest you, read no more.

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